From Public Libraries to Systems Change: Designing for Belonging
We’re thrilled to share that three Harmonic voices are featured in the newest edition of Touchpoint, the peer-reviewed journal of the Service Design Network (SDN)—a global platform for sharing service design thinking and practice. Touchpoint Vol. 16 No. 2 focuses on a timely and vital theme: Equitable Experiences. It explores how service design can go beyond inclusion, redesigning systems to ensure everyone can participate meaningfully and benefit fully from the services around them.
Shaping Equitable Experiences, One Partnership at a Time
Leah Berg and Becky Scheel co-authored an article with Diana Keane, Planning and Projects Manager at Richland Library, exploring how inclusive design practices can support equity in public services. Pulling from their backgrounds in designing for cultural institutions, Berg and Scheel explore what equity looks like in physical and experiential environments.
Titled Access Freely: Collaborative Service Design for Inclusive Library Experiences, the piece shares examples of how staff-led experiments—like multisensory literacy resources, persona-based service planning, and flexible curbside pickup—have helped reduce barriers to access for patrons across ability, age, and geography. Richland Library’s approach reflects a deeper shift: treating service design not as a one-time project but as a long-term, evolving practice. Through its collaboration with Harmonic, the library has embedded co-design into everyday work, inviting patrons and staff to shape solutions together and test new ideas quickly.
“This work is ongoing—and powerful because it is shared. In every experiment, conversation, and co-designed solution, Richland shows what’s possible when service design is practiced not just for communities but with them.”
The article provides a grounded look at what it takes to make services more equitable, starting with intentional design practices that reflect community needs and value lived experience.
What does equity mean when the system itself creates harm? Darwin Muljono urges service designers to ask harder questions.
In another contribution, Darwin Muljono asks, Will the Radical Designers, Please Stand Up?—a powerful provocation for service designers to critically examine the economic systems and structures perpetuating inequity. The piece calls for a deeper interrogation of how design operates within capitalism and urges practitioners to imagine alternatives that place care, justice, and collective well-being at the center.
“The responsibility of radical designers is not to design for inclusion into a system that is inherently exploitative and unjust; rather, it is to first imagine and then create alternatives where emancipation is possible for all.”
Both articles underscore Harmonic’s commitment to co-creation, systems thinking, and inclusive design. Whether through long-standing partnerships or pushing the field to ask more complicated questions, our harmonicas continue to shape the future of service design.
You can explore both contributions in Touchpoint Vol. 16 No. 2, available now through SDN.
📖 Read the full journal at the Service Design Network
